104th Bloomsday

“Stately plump Buck Mulligan…” is the way it all starts in Martello tower one fine June 16th in 1904 that changed the literary world forever. The first time I read Ulysses I read the Odyssey prior to so that I would have an idea of the analogy. I might have read all of Shakespeare and memorized Hamlet too if I really thought I was going to be able to figure out what old nimble Jimbo had in mind when he decided to do a day in the life of Dirty Old Dublin. It helped a little that I had been a Latin spouting alter boy.
I’ve written on the inside of the book cover when I read and reread the book and where I was at the time. No lectures about writing in books please. I paid $2.50 for my raggedy-ass copy at a second hand joint in Cambridge forty years ago and now it’s margins are full of my scribbles from the successive reads. I figure I must have read the thing one entire time half lit for all the times that I would have a jar while curled up with this curious tale that still has me intrigued after all these years. I’d read till the pages got blurry and then the next time I’d have to reread all that had happened while I was enjoying that last drink. Over the years, it’s got to amount to one whole read.
Once I sent in a dollar for the “One Minute Ulysses” to a clever fellow named David Lasky down in VA who nailed the story in an 8 page comic book style. I have wondered for a long time how he decided what to leave out and it reminds me of the sculptor who explained how he worked, “If I’m carving an elephant, I just take away everything that doesn’t look like it’s part of an elephant.”
Here’s my synopsis for those of you who have only read the end.
The story of two Dubliners wandering around the town for 24 hours is supposed to run parallel with Odysseus coming back the war in Troy which takes him ten years. It takes two people to tell this story and so we have the young and brilliant Stephen Dedalus who resembles the author in many ways and is some one we know of from Portrait of the Artist as a young man. Poor old Paddy Dignam has bought the farm and we meet a lot of his friends at the funeral. Leopold Bloom is there too (as he is the other half) but he is not exactly in with the crowd and we easily come to believe that it has to do with his Jewishness which he doesn’t practice and seems to resent, somewhat. After the funeral the mourners take up residence in Davey Byrne’s where much airing of the world’s worries is done at the bar. Bloom orders a glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola sandwich which has become the official meal of this day for U fans the world over.
Stephen has quit his teaching job that morning and taken what little money he is owed to town to attend Paddy’s send off. His father Simon, “a noisy man, full of his son,” holds forth at Davey’s and soon Stephen moves on with friends of his own. Bloom shoves off by himself and contemplates the letter he has from a mysterious Martha who occupies much of his thoughts, but then he has a lot of thoughts and we listen in while he goes to buy Martha soap and then heads to the baths and later the Strand where he espies poor Gerty MacDowel, a comely lass with a limp. He has impure thoughts about her but only tips his bowler as he passes. He seems to think that his amourous imaginations are justified because he’s more or less certain that his wife Molly not only shares the stage with Blazes Boylan, the famous tenor, but also his bed.
Stephen hits the bars and a bawdy house which he gets thrown out of sort of and Bloom takes him to Night Town. Nobody get’s laid but Stephen gets stewed and Bloom takes him for coffee before inviting him home. They talk and Stephen decides to pass on spending what little night is left at 7 Eccles, Blooms abode.
Bloom makes enough noise below stairs to wake Molly whose famous soliloquy while lying in bed takes up the last 40 pages employing the stream of consciousness style that has come to define Joyce. It ends “…how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again and then he said would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”